Thanks everyone for all the kind words but you are suppose to come in here quietly and whisper way to go Teresa Ballard so not to anger the gods. I mean look at poor Medusa, all she did was say out loud she was beautiful and loved Poseidon and the girl got a head full of snakes and all those stone men outside her door. Having had both stone men and snakes, I don't need the trouble.

Anyway I finished my ten pages of syntax and the manuscript is almost done again. One of the most useful tools Carolyn taught me (that I am passing to you) was the mapping technique where you take each poems topic thread such as: hide=sex, animal, betrayal. You do this with every poem and then you weave in and out your topics through out the whole manuscript so then the whole book becomes a poem, with each poem being its own line. Painting is like this: walk away and it is color, come close it is nothing more than brush strokes.

Yes, I have thought about this book way too much and yet so not enough.

Mid-American Review 

Lucky

The best things come to me in threes. I always have to do something three times and then I know it forever. I think my third love will be my best love and to adhere to this principle the poetry gods sent me a wonderful letter. The Mid-American Review accepted all THREE of my poems. Yes, that would be all three of the poems I sent them with a letter thanking me for sending such exceptional work. God I hope they don’t mean another Teresa Ballard. And feel free to break into song because yesterday Hunger Mountain said they are holding one of my poems for the November guest issue and that combined with Massachusetts Review makes yes, three acceptances in the last week. Good thing my personal life is going to hell b/c I might start to think I am lucky.

... 

the confused owl

The confused owl and I have become friends. She wakes me at 6:30 in the morning to tell me her night has begun and I sit with her and have my coffee. When I was leaving my husband, when I had two small girls at my hip I found an owl outside in the lilac bush in the middle of the day chased there by crows. I stood guard for two hours with a stick and every time the crows would swarm down I’d take a swing until the owl flew to the next tree and we continued like this: crow, owl, woman and stick until we lost each other.

Next week will be my eleventh wedding anniversary. I remember my parents’ eleventh anniversary, leaving us behind to drive to Montreal. I remember realizing for the first time, my parents were people, individual people who had existed somewhere alone before they met. Oh the frightening information of childhood.

Somewhere in my closet I have all the letters from the divorce, the ones people wrote telling me not leave. The ones with images of my children becoming serial killers, drug addicts, my brother’s letter claiming that urban living had corrupted my soul and one from a girl in high school who met an aunt at the A&P and was told promptly that I had lost my mind, nervous breakdown and my aunt claimed it was because I had left a man who was suppose to take care of me.

Yes they are all in my closet, even some I have not read and I wonder if it is time now, to burn them all because even though I was wrong about some things, leaving my husband did not make me instantly happy or loved. I was right about some things to—the girls and I are alive. Strong. We sleep in tents, read books about snakes. We go outside in the rain and my daughters trust me to take care of them. In every part of their being they know they are loved by me and even on bad days, they know their mother will keep them safe, she knows how to handle a stick.

I am working 50 hours a week and living on beer and sushi. Thank you god today is Friday. I will surround myself with books tommorrow and do nothing but read and sleep, well maybe eat more sushi.

... 

Well if you were driving down Cedar Ave. about five minutes ago and you saw a girl with curly hair, no hands on the wheel, driving a little too fast, drumming her hands in the air to Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy”, racing the boys at the light by winking and gunning her engine…well that was me and it can only mean one thing. I FINISH MY MANUSCRIPT for the Loft. Yes I did and the deadline wasn’t till tomorrow which means I fulfilled my own personal goal of not dragging my ass there the last possible minute. But of course, I did slip it under the door like a three pound abandoned baby because I could not get it done before eight.

Only three more grants to write before June 30th and then I can dance around naked. I am in a dancing mood tonight. And then if I actually receive any of the above grants I get to stay home and write for at least two months straight with my nanny named Lola taking care of the girls. It will be a good life.

...the hard shell bird... 

Tonight I am thinking of sea turtles, how they travel thousands of miles alone but return to the place where they began to mate, how they know it is home by the taste of water in their mouths.

For four hours, if they are sleeping they can live underwater and when awake only a few minutes. In one world, they are weightless and in another they move so slowly it is almost death. On land they cry tears. Pockets of salt water saved from the places they have been.

The turtle never changes but the world constantly changes around them and b/c of this, in each environment a new creature is born almost directly opposite from the one it has been.

Good Reading

and turn on your sound people. Btw wonderful interview with Claudia.

bear 

Well I survived the camping trip. The highlight was taking a group of kids on a midnight hike (I was the only adult they could convince to do this) and we shut off our flashlights and walked in complete darkness, when we reached the bridge we held the lights up to the sky, a whole world of insects glittered over our heads. You could hear the owls in the distance, the night birds flying down and feasting. It was beautiful.

The next night I went for a walk at night by myself and watched the lightening bugs high in the trees over my heads. When I was little they always seemed low to the earth so easy to touch to capture. I wonder when lightening bugs figured out to head to higher ground.

There are lots of changes coming in my life over the next month. It is possible I could be moving back to New England. What ever the case, with change I have no idea how it will all balance out, what my writing life will look like, I feel so close to something and it almost feels like it is being taken away.

I hate change. You would think I would be good at it by now. I want to go high up into the trees today and I do not want to come back down.

one rock 

Before Goldilocks was eaten by a bear

Well it is pretty safe to say I am the only parent on the 4th and 5th grade camping trip who is bringing her manuscript, four books, and fives pages on syntax. Oh and hopefully though I am debating how pitiful I really am and thinking about my laptop. Whether I have rain gear or clean underwear is another question. Yes, I understand I will be in the woods with countless kids but the thing is, large groups entertain themselves, throw em a box of twinkies or a glow in the dark ball and well that is at least five pages of silence.

So before Goldilocks was eaten by a bear she said goodbye to her blogger friends. She said, now be good and don’t piss on my carpet. I will be back with poems or at least maybe a thought. And Goldilocks put in a secret note for the bird, the beautiful bird to say there will be photos. Wonderful photos.

Yep this was my past week

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Can you name ten different beer brands but none of the Ten Commandments? That's one of 25 signs that you will ultimately go to hell, according to divinity professor Jacob Pinewood, quoted in the Weekly World News. Here are other behaviors that may cause you eternal damnation: using the F word more than once a day; coveting your neighbor's household appliances; watching five consecutive hours of TV; invoking the Lord's name in vain when you stub your toe; and mentally undressing any person who would be bad for you to get naked with. Luckily for you, Leo, you're now in an astrological phase when engaging in the above actions will not earn you a trip to the infernal regions. That's because you're in an unprecedented grace period when you have slack to burn. If I were you, though, I'd use my karmic credit more constructively than simply getting away with naughty things.

... 

I received ten pages of notes on my manuscript this morning from Carolyn. Ten pages.

I have watched a master painter before at college. I watched him from across the room, the way all the light changed when he played with certain colors. Some people can look at a line to a poem and just see a line while others can look and see amazing connections almost as if that one line becomes a being you can walk around.

Forche is trying to teach me to see that. To make every word sing and deserve its place. But today I feel a little like a mule being taught ballet. I have hairy legs and I don’t fit into those pretty shoes. (It should be noted here I don’t really have hairy legs.)But I am a girl who gets a little overwhelmed by fives pages on syntax.

I need sleep. I need time. I need a nanny. Thursday I am heading out of town for a long weekend in the woods with about thirty, four and fifth graders. Why you ask, well because I am the damn mom. Now the manuscript has graduated from being in my car to sleeping with me in the tent. Someday I will look back on all this and smile. Today is not that day.

for olivia 

My Daughter Is A Photograph

A hand held on green moss, she waits
this white limb, this ivory lizard on a gallery wall.

There was a woman I once knew, an artist
who covered her children with leaves
photographed them naked in mud
and as they grew
her audience complained--
a young penis turned to bark.

Is it not the same with us?

My small kitten, my wet love.
The one who sprang from these legs
wrapped in the branches
and twigs of my motherwant.

Daughter, you are the shape of my pocket
carried like stone through the mud of my life.

These are the images I create
photographs taken
as innocence slips by.